Martha Crenshaw

Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Emerita
Ph.D., University of Virginia (1973)
B.A., Newcomb College of Tulane University (1967)
headshot of woman with purple jacket and black shirt
Martha Crenshaw is a senior fellow at CISAC and FSI and a professor of political science by courtesy at Stanford. She was the Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor of Global Issues and Democratic Thought and professor of government at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., where she taught from 1974 to 2007. She has written extensively on the issue of political terrorism; her first article, "The Concept of Revolutionary Terrorism," was published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1972. In 2011 Routledge published Explaining Terrorism, a collection of her previously published work. With Gary LaFree, she is the author of Countering Terrorism (Brookings Institution Press, 2017).

She served on the Executive Board of Women in International Security and is a former President and Councilor of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP). She coordinated the working group on political explanations of terrorism for the 2005 Club de Madrid International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security. In 2005-2006 she was a Guggenheim Fellow. From 2005 to 2017 she was a lead investigator with the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, funded by the Department of Homeland Security. In 2009 she was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation/Department of Defense Minerva Initiative for a project on "mapping terrorist organizations." She serves on the editorial boards of the journals International Security, Political Psychology, Security Studies, Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict, Orbis, and Terrorism and Political Violence. She recently served as a member of the Committee on Evaluating the Effectiveness of the Global Nuclear Detection Architecture of the National Academies of Science.

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